Part 9

Perhaps with that expansion youth will finally effect a reconciliation with life of those two supremest and most poignant of adventures: the thoughts that cluster around sex, and the fears and hopes that cluster around death, the one the gateway into life, the other out of it. Youth finds them the two hardest aspects of life to adjust with the rest of the world in which we live. They are ever-present and pervasive, and yet their manifestations always cause us surprise, and shock us as of something unwonted intruding in our daily affairs. They are the unseen spectres behind life, of which we are always dimly conscious, but which we are always afraid to meet boldly and face to face. We speak of them furtively, or in far-away poetical strains. They are the materials for the tragedies of life, of its pathos and wistfulness, of its splendors and defeats. Yet they are treated always with an incorrigible and dishonest delicacy. The world, youth soon finds, is a much less orderly and refined place than would appear on the surface of our daily intercourse and words. As we put on our best clothes to appear in public, so the world puts on its best clothes to appear in talk and print.

Men ignore death, as if they were quite unconscious that it would sometime come to them, yet who knows how many pensive or terrible moments the thought gives them? But the spectre is quite invisible to us. Or if they have passions, and respond as sensitively as a vibrating string to sex influences and appeals, we have little indication of that throbbing life behind the impenetrable veil of their countenances. We can know what people think about all other things, even what they think about God, but what they think of these two adventures of sex and death we never know. It is not so much, I am willing to believe, shame or fear that keeps us from making a parade of them, as awe and wonder and baffled endeavors to get our attitude towards them into expressible form. They are too elemental, too vast and overpowering in their workings to fit neatly into this busy, accounted-for, and tied-down world of daily life. They are superfluous to what we see as the higher meanings of this our life, and irritate us by their clamorous insistence and disregard for the main currents of our living. They seem irrelevant to life; or rather they overtop its bounty. Their pressure to be let in is offensive, and taints and mars irrevocably what would otherwise be so pleasant and secure a life. That is, perhaps, why we call manifestations of sex activity, obscene, and of death, morbid and ghastly.

In these modern days we are adopting a healthier attitude, especially towards sex. Perhaps the rising generation will be successful in reconciling them both, and working them into our lives, where they may be seen in their right relations and proportions, and no longer the pleasure of sex and the peace of death seem an illegitimate obtrusion into life. To get command of these arch-enemies is an endeavor worthy of the moral heroes of to-day. We can get control, it seems, of the rest of our souls, but these always lie in wait to torment and harass us. To tame this obsession of sex and the fear of death will be a Herculean task for youth in the adventure of life. Perhaps some will succeed where we have failed. For usually when we try to tame sex, it poisons the air around us, and if we try to tame the fear of death by resigning ourselves to its inevitability, we find that we have not tamed it but only drugged it. At certain times, however, our struggles with the winged demons which they send into our minds may constitute the most poignant incidents in our adventure of life, and add a beauty to our lives. Where they do not make for happiness, they may at least make for a deepening of knowledge and appreciation of life. Along through middle life, we shall find, perhaps, that, even if untamed, they have become our allies, and that both have lost their sting and their victory,--sex diffusing our life with a new beauty, and death with a courageous trend towards a larger life of which we shall be an integral part.

When we have acclimated ourselves to youth, suddenly death looms up as the greatest of dangers in our adventure of life. It puzzles and shocks and saddens us by its irrevocability and mystery. That we should be taken out of this world to which we are so perfectly adapted, and which we enjoy and feel intimate with, is an incredible thing. Even if we believe that we shall survive death, we know that that after-life must perforce be lived outside of this our familiar world. Reason tells us that we shall be annihilated, and yet we cannot conceive our own annihilation. We can easier imagine the time before our birth, when we were not, than the time after our death, when we shall not be. Old men find nothing very dreadful in the thought of being no more, and we shall find that it is the combined notion of being annihilated, and yet of being somehow conscious of that annihilation, that terrifies us, and startles our minds sometimes in the dead of night when our spirits are sluggish and the ghoulish ideas that haunt the dimmest chambers of the mind are flitting abroad. We can reason with ourselves that if we are annihilated we shall not be conscious of it, and if we are conscious we shall not be annihilated, but this easy proof does not help us much in a practical way. We simply do not know, and all speculations seem to be equally legitimate. If we are destined to assume another form of life, no divination can prophesy for us what that life shall be.

On the face of it the soul as well as the body dies. The fate of the body we know, and it seems dreadful enough to chill the stoutest heart; and what we call our souls seem so intimately dependent upon these bodies as to be incapable of living alone. And yet somehow it is hard to stop believing in the independent soul. We can believe that the warmth dissipates, that the chemical and electrical energies of the body pass into other forms and are gradually lost in the immensity of the universe. But this wonder of consciousness, which seems to hold and embrace all our thoughts and feelings and bind them together, what can we know of its power and permanence? In our own limited sphere it already transcends space and time, our imaginations triumphing over space, and our memories and anticipations over time: this magic power of the imagination, which transcends our feeble experience and gives ideas and images which have not appeared directly through the senses. We can connect this conscious life with no other aspect of the world nor can we explain it by any of the principles which we apply to physical things. It is the divine gift that reveals this world; why may it not reveal sometime a far wider universe?

It is this incalculability of our conscious life that makes its seeming end so great an adventure. This Time which rushes past us, blotting out everything it creates, leaving us ever suspended on a Present, which, as we turn to look at it, has melted away,--how are we to comprehend it? The thin, fragile and uncertain stream of our memory seems insufficient to give any satisfaction of permanence. I like to think of a world-memory that retains the past. Physical things that change or perish continue to live psychically in memory; why may not all that passes, not only in our minds, but unknown to us, be carried along in a great world-mind of whose nature we get a dim inkling even now in certain latent mental powers of ours which are sometimes revealed, and seem to let down bars into a boundless sea of knowledge. The world is a great, rushing, irreversible life, not predestined in its workings, but free like ourselves. The accumulating past seems to cut into the future, and create it as it goes along. Nothing is then lost, and we, although we had no existence before we were born,--how could we have, since that moving Present had not created us?--would yet, having been born, continue to exist in that world-memory. We do not need to reëcho the sadness of the centuries,--“Everything passes; nothing remains!” For even if we take this world-memory at its lowest terms as a social memory, the effects of the deeds of men, for good or for evil, remain. And their words remain, the distillation of their thought and experience. This we know, and we know, moreover, that “one thing at least is certain,” not that “this life dies”--for that has yet to be proved--but that “the race lives!” Nature is so careless about the individual life, so careful for the species, that it seems as if it were only the latter that counted, that her only purpose was the eternal continuation of life. And many to-day find a satisfaction for their cravings for immortality in the thought that they will live in their children and so on immortally as long as their line continues.

But we have a right to make greater hazards of faith than this. Might it not be that, although nature never purposed that the individual soul should live, man has outwitted her? He has certainly outwitted her in regard to his bodily life. There was no provision in nature for man’s living by tillage of the soil and domestication of animals, or for his dwelling in houses built with tools in his hands, or for traveling at lightning speed, or for harnessing her forces to run for him the machines that should turn out the luxuries and utilities of life. All these were pure gratuities, devised by man and wrested from nature’s unwilling hands. She was satisfied with primitive, animal-like man, as she is satisfied with him in some parts of the world to-day. We have simply got ahead of her. All the other animals are still under her dominion, but man has become the tool-maker and the partial master of nature herself. Although still far from thoroughly taming her, he finds in the incessant struggle his real life purpose, his inspiration, and his work, and still brighter promises for his children’s children. For the race lives and takes advantage of all that has been discovered before.

Now, since nature has seemed to care as little about the continuation of life beyond death as she has of man’s comfort upon earth, might it not be that, just as we have outwitted her in the physical sphere and snatched comfort and utility by our efforts, so we may, by the cultivation of our intelligence and sentiments and whole spiritual life, outwit her in this realm and snatch an immortality that she has never contemplated? She never intended that we should audaciously read her secrets and speculate upon her nature as we have done. Who knows whether, by our hardihood in exploring the uncharted seas of the life of feeling and thought, we may have over-reached her again and created a real soul, which we can project beyond death? We are provided with the raw material of our spiritual life in the world, as we are provided with the raw material to build houses, and it may be our power and our privilege to build our immortal souls here on earth, as men have built and are still building the civilization of this world of ours. This would not mean that we could all attain, any more than that all men have the creative genius or the good-will for the constructive work of civilization; there may be “real losses and real losers” in the adventure for immortality, but to the stout-hearted and the wise it will be possible. We shall need, as builders need the rules of the craft, the aid and counsel of the spiritually gifted who have gone before us. It has been no mistake that we have prized them higher even than our material builders, for we have felt instinctively the spiritual power with which they have endowed us in the contest for the mighty stake of immortality. They are helping us to it, and we have the right to rely on their visions and trusts and beliefs in this supremest and culminating episode of the adventure of life.

Are all such speculations idle and frivolous? Have they no place on the mental horizon of a youth of to-day, living in a world whose inner nature all the mighty achievements of the scientists, fruitful as they have been in their practical effects, have tended rather to obscure than to illumine? Well, a settled conviction that we live in a mechanical world, with no penumbra of mystery about us, checks the life-enhancing powers, and chills and depresses the spirit. A belief in the deadness of things actually seems to kill much of the glowing life that makes up our appreciation of art and personality in the world. The scientific philosophy is as much a matter of metaphysics, of theoretical conjecture, as the worst fanaticisms of religion. We have a right to shoot our guesses into the unknown. Life is no adventure if we let our knowledge, still so feeble and flickering, smother us. In this scientific age there is a call for youth to soar and paint a new spiritual sky to arch over our heads. If the old poetry is dead, youth must feel and write the new poetry. It has a challenge both to transcend the physical evil that taints the earth and the materialistic poison that numbs our spirits.

The wise men thought they were getting the old world thoroughly charted and explained. But there has been a spiritual expansion these recent years which has created new seas to be explored and new atmospheres to breathe. It has been discovered that the world is alive, and that discovery has almost taken away men’s breaths; it has been discovered that evolution is creative and that we are real factors in that creation. After exploring the heights and depths of the stars, and getting ourselves into a state of mind where we saw the world objectively and diminished man and his interests almost to a pin-point, we have come with a rush to the realization that personality and values are, after all, the important things in a living world. And no problem of life or death can be idle. A hundred years ago it was thought chastening to the fierce pride of youth to remind it often of man’s mortality. But youth to-day must think of everything in terms of life; yes, even of death in terms of life. We need not the chastening of pride, but the stimulation to a sense of the limitless potentialities of life. No thought or action that really enhances life is frivolous or fruitless.

What does not conduce in some way to men’s interests does not enhance life. What decides in the long run whether our life will be adventurous or not is the direction and the scope of our interests. We need a livelier imaginative sympathy and interest in all that pertains to human nature and its workings. It is a good sign that youth does not need to have its attention called to the worthy and profitable interest of its own personality. It is a healthy sign that we are getting back home again to the old endeavor of “Know thyself!” Our widening experience has shifted the centre of gravity too far from man’s soul. A cultivation of the powers of one’s own personality is one of the greatest needs of life, too little realized even in these assertive days, and the exercise of the personality makes for its most durable satisfactions. Men are attentive to their business affairs, but not nearly enough to their own deeper selves. If they treated their business interests as they do the interests of their personality, they would be bankrupt within a week. Few people even scratch the surface, much less exhaust the contemplation, of their own experience. Few know how to weave a philosophy of life out of it, that most precious of all possessions. And few know how to hoard their memory. For no matter what we have come through, or how many perils we have safely passed, or how imperfect and jagged--in some places perhaps irreparably--our life has been, we cannot in our heart of hearts imagine how it could have been different. As we look back on it, it slips in behind us in orderly array, and, with all its mistakes, acquires a sort of eternal fitness, and even, at times, of poetic glamour.

The things I did, I did because, after all, I am that sort of a person--that is what life is;--and in spite of what others and what I myself might desire, it is that kind of a person that I am. The golden moments I can take a unique and splendid satisfaction in because they are my own; my realization of how poor and weak they might seem, if taken from my treasure-chest and exposed to the gaze of others, does not taint their preciousness, for I can see them in the larger light of my own life. Every man should realize that his life is an epic; unfortunately it usually takes the onlooker to recognize the fact before he does himself. We should oftener read our own epics--and write them. The world is in need of true autobiographies, told in terms of the adventure that life is. Not every one, it is said, possesses the literary gift, but what, on the other hand, is the literary gift but an absorbing interest in the personality of things, and an insight into the wonders of living? Unfortunately it is usually only the eccentric or the distinguished who reveal their inner life. Yet the epic of the humblest life, told in the light of its spiritual shocks and changes, would be enthralling in its interest. But the best autobiographers are still the masters of fiction, those wizards of imaginative sympathy, who create souls and then write their spiritual history, as those souls themselves, were they alive, could perhaps never write them. Every man, however, can cultivate this autobiographical interest in himself, and produce for his own private view a real epic of spiritual adventure. And life will be richer and more full of meaning as the story continues and life accumulates.

Life changes so gradually that we do not realize our progress. This small triumph of yesterday we fail to recognize as the summit of the mountain at whose foot we encamped several years ago in despair. We forget our hopes and wistfulness and struggles. We do not look down from the summit at the valley where we started, and thus we lose the dramatic sense of something accomplished. If a man looking back sees no mountain and valley, but only a straight level plain, it behooves him to take himself straight to some other spiritual country where there is opportunity for climbing and where five years hence will see him on a higher level, breathing purer air. Most people have no trouble in remembering their rights and their wrongs, their pretensions and their ambitions,--things so illusory that they should never even have been thought of. But to forget their progress, to forget their golden moments, their acquisitions of insight and appreciation, the charm of their friends, the sequence of their ideals,--this is indeed a deplorable aphasia! “The days that make us happy make us wise!” Happiness is too valuable to be forgotten, and who will remember yours if you forget it? It is what has made the best of you; or, if you have thrown it away from memory, what could have made you, and made you richer than you are. If you have neglected such contemplation, you are poor, and that poverty will be apparent in your daily personality.

Life in its essence is a heaping-up and accumulation of thought and insight. It should mount higher and higher, and be more potent and flowering as life is lived. If you do not keep in your memory and spirit the finer accumulations of your life, it will be as if you had only partly lived. Your living will be a travesty on life, and your progress only a dull mechanical routine. Even though your life may be outwardly routine, inwardly, as moralists have always known, it may be full of adventure. Be happy, but not too contented. Contentment may be a vice as well as a virtue; too often it is a mere cover for sluggishness, and not a sign of triumph. The mind must have a certain amount of refreshment and novelty; it will not grow by staying too comfortably at home, and refusing to put itself to the trouble of travel and change. It needs to be disturbed every now and then to keep the crust from forming. People do not realize this, and let themselves become jaded and uninterested--and therefore uninteresting--when such a small touch of novelty would inspire and stimulate them. A tired interest, in a healthy mind, wakes with as quick a response to a new touch or aspect as does a thirsty flower to the rain. Too many people sit in prison with themselves until they get meagre and dull, when the door was really all the time open, and outside was freshness and green grass and the warm sun, which might have revived them and made them bright again. Listlessness in an old man or woman is often the telltale sign of such an imprisonment. Life, instead of being an accumulation of spiritual treasure, has been the squandering of its wealth, in a lapse of interest, as soon as it was earned. Even unbearable sorrow might have been the means, by a process of transmutation, of acquiring a deeper appreciation of life’s truer values. But the squanderer has lost his vision, because he did not retain on the background of memory his experience, against which to contrast his new reactions, and did not have the emotional image of old novelties to spur him to the apprehension and appreciation of new ones.

More amazing even than the lack of a healthy interest in their own personalities is the lack of most people of an interest, beyond one of a trivial or professional nature, in others. Our literary artists have scarcely begun to touch the resources of human ways and acts. Writers surrender reality for the sake of a plot, and in attempting to make a point, or to write adventure, squeeze out the natural traits and nuances of character and the haphazardnesses of life that are the true adventure and point. We cannot know too much about each other. All our best education comes from what people tell us or what we observe them do. We cannot endure being totally separated from others, and it is well that we cannot. For it would mean that we should have then no life above the satisfaction of our crudest material wants. Our keenest delights are based upon some manifestation or other of social life. Even gossip arises not so much from malice as from a real social interest in our neighbors; the pity of it is, of course, that to so many people it is only the misfortunes and oddities that are interesting.

Let our interests in the social world with which we come in contact be active and not passive. Let us give back in return as good an influence and as much as is given to us. Let us live so as to stimulate others, so that we call out the best powers and traits in them, and make them better than they are, because of our comprehension and inspiration. Our life is so bound up with our friends and teachers and heroes (whether present in the flesh or not), and we are so dependent upon them for nourishment and support, that we are rarely aware how little of us there would be left were they to be taken away. We are seldom conscious enough of the ground we are rooted in and the air we breathe. We can know ourselves best by knowing others. There are adventures of personality in acting and being acted upon, in studying and delighting in the ideas and folkways of people that hold much in store for those who will only seek them.